‘The Paramount deal is in trouble. It’s not about the movies.’
Sharon Waxman at The New York Times
Hollywood “has been thrown sideways by the news that 12 state attorneys general might have found a way to trip up the merger that almost nobody in the entertainment industry wanted,” says Sharon Waxman. For “months, the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance has been an all-but-done deal,” but concerns “over the future of CNN” are “what is driving the forces against this deal.” Paramount “seems well aware of this narrative,” and “there will be legal arguments.”
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‘How bots took over our lives’
T.M. Brown at The New Yorker
During the “past decade, so-called bots, a slippery concept from the start, have gone from a conspiratorial curiosity to a familiar force in our daily lives,” says T.M. Brown. In the “popular imagination, they are suddenly everywhere and seem designed to annoy the hell out of people.” But the “impulse to treat bots like digital mosquitoes that need to be swatted away minimizes their role in making the internet work.” Bots are “most often used for mundane tasks.”
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‘Israel runs the Iran playbook on Turkey’
Mason Letteau Stallings at The American Conservative
One of the “stranger geopolitical developments in the Middle East of late (leaving aside the present war) has been the rupture between Israel and Turkey,” says Mason Letteau Stallings. Most “worrying, considering the conflict in which the United States currently finds itself embroiled, are Israeli comparisons of Turkey to Iran.” From a “historical perspective, this is surprising,” but it’s “important to ensure that Israeli (or Turkish) interests, to the extent these diverge from our own, do not shape American policymaking.”
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‘Donald Trump has turned the United States into an economic banana republic’
Richard Poplak at The Globe and Mail
The United States “has become perhaps the world’s first functioning Third World economy,” says Richard Poplak. While “he wouldn’t be caught dead articulating it this way, Mr. Trump’s vision is to turn the United States into a Third World economy.” While the “analogy is not perfect, it’s far from outlandish: however much the actual adults in the Oval Office may disapprove, the U.S. has reshaped revenue collection around the simple, regressive models preferred by Third World dictators.”
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